Treating people as rational can glorify their unfreedom
Evidence
What was it supposed to mean when Adorno emotionally emphasized that anyone wanting to treat people as if they were rational and human was contributing to the glorification of what was being done to them; that anyone objecting that empirical social research was too mechanical, too coarse and unintellectual was transferring these traits from the objects of sociology to sociology itself; and that the muchderided inhumanity of empirical methods was nevertheless more humane than the humanization of what was inhuman? — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 478
Categorization
- DEEPTHINKING: The paradox that method’s ‘inhumanity’ is more humane than a humanized inhumanity inverts the standard critique of positivist research and needs days of unpacking.
- QUESTION: What exactly does Adorno mean by ‘the humanization of what was inhuman’ — is it the human-relations ideology of factory research?
- XREF: connects to: Modern rationality has expanded until almost nothing remains genuinely irrational or incomprehensible — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 590; Objectification becomes bourgeois rationalization when objectivity remains unfree. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 267; Institutions can deliberately cultivate servility as a form of unfreedom (+4 more)
- yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Modern rationality has expanded until almost nothing remains genuinely irrational or incomprehensible — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 590; Objectification becomes bourgeois rationalization when objectivity remains unfree. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 267; Institutions can deliberately cultivate servility as a form of unfreedom (+4 more)